Simpson on Sunday: In this conflict, the smartest weapon of them all is treachery

By John Simpson

12:01AM BST 21 Oct 2001

ON this sector of the front north of Kabul we are still in the drole de guerre phase. There is desultory action every day: puffs of brown smoke blossom over the wonderful Shomali Plain, we have heard American cluster bombs falling on the Taliban rear lines, and the Northern Alliance insists that smart bombs have been landing too.

That's all - except for an incident on Friday when a BBC cameraman was filming from the wrecked control tower of Bagram air base, and his Northern Alliance escorts peered at the Taliban a little too provocatively through their binoculars. As a result, a Taliban tank-round landed close beside them. Did the gunner miss deliberately, by way of friendly warning, or was he simply a bad shot? In Afghanistan, both explanations are possible. At some stage, American and British attention will presumably switch to us.

Bagram air base, littered with the corpses of aircraft from the old Afghan air force, is a natural jumping-off point for any attack on Kabul. First, though, the Taliban frontline will have to be smashed; it is only a mile from the airport perimeter, and has been heavily reinforced during the past week. Night after night, from our superb vantage point in Charikar's wrecked municipality building, we watch the vehicles bringing up new troops: perhaps the unfortunates arrested in Kabul by Taliban press gangs. But as long as Charikar awaits its turn on the Pentagon's list of priorities, it would be wrong to give the impression that trench-warfare here bears any resemblance to Passchendaele or Monte Cassino. A long section of the Northern Alliance frontline which I visited last week was defended by three men, one of whom had a wooden leg. They were very bored; our arrival was the first interesting thing that had happened in weeks.

The fact is, wars in Afghanistan are rarely won by fighting. The mujahideen victory over the ex-Communist President Najibullah in 1992 and the Taliban victory over what became the Northern Alliance in 1996 were both the result of treachery, not military superiority. Someone sold out; and in this war, too, someone in some key position will sell out and the Taliban will be history.

This will only happen, though, when the Taliban and their supporters realise that they are losing. At present they don't. It is hard to exaggerate the extent of the Taliban leadership's ignorance of the real world, and so far it has been allowed to believe that the American and British attacks on Kabul and Kandahar are the heaviest the two countries can mount. Having experienced the bombings of Baghdad in 1991 and Belgrade in 1999, I know how surprisingly mild this kind of warfare can seem. The inhabitants creep out of their shelters each morning, peer around them, and marvel at the small amount of damage modern precision weaponry can do. Forget the rubbish people talk about "carpet-bombing"; that is a folk-memory from another age.

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In Baghdad, when the bombing finished, I counted only 29 buildings destroyed; in Belgrade, although there was more carelessness, the number can't have been much greater. That was why Milosevic endured the Nato bombing for 77 days. The paradox is that the most advanced weapons systems in the world do less overt damage than the Taliban can manage with their antique field-guns and tanks. The small-time dictators whom the Americans take on nowadays are able to boast that they have survived the worst that the world's sole superpower can throw at them.

The word from Washington, inasmuch as it reaches the BBC in Charikar, is that the CIA wants much heavier bombing of the Taliban frontline, while the State Department is against it.

The trouble with the State Department's approach is that the butcher's bill from each attack on Kabul - eight civilians slaughtered one day, five the next - has as much impact around the world as the deaths of several hundred Taliban soldiers killed in a single series of air-strikes. What gave Nato so much grief two years ago was that the attacks on Serbia and Kosovo were strung out for so long, and international opposition had such time to build up. Clearly, though, we aren't yet at the big-hitting stage. The Americans want to get a proper government-in-waiting ready before the Northern Alliance fights or buys its way through the Taliban lines to Kabul; they don't trust the alliance to govern Afghanistan on its own. Fine - but what worries me, as I sit here looking out over the front line and listening to the occasional crump of a Taliban shell, is that hanging around rarely does any good in warfare.

Phoney wars have a bad effect on everyone. The Northern Alliance soldiers agree; it wouldn't surprise me if the Taliban did too.